ADLINK Technology (Taiwan) - I-Pi SMARC provides easy and affordable prototyping on an industrial-ready hardware platform with extended lifecycle management.

ADLINK Technology, a global leader in edge computing, has announced the Industrial-Pi (I-Pi) SMARC (‘Smart Mobility ARChitecture’) Development Kit, designed to provide engineers an industrial-ready prototyping platform. ADLINK I-Pi SMARC Development Kit gives engineers a low-cost platform, for use at work or home, to experiment with peripherals and sensors, and develop prototype versions of potential products, knowing the industrial-grade SMARC module they are using is supported by an ADLINK change control process. The development kit is an industrial-ready substitute for Arduino and Raspberry Pi (RPi) platforms that are commonly used for prototyping but cannot typically be ‘dropped’ into an industrial solution as-is.

ADLINK’s I-Pi SMARC development kit contains an I-Pi carrier board, an LEC-PX30 SMARC module, a power supply, a USB programming cable, an SD memory card containing a Linux OS, and transparent acrylic shielding that balances protection and access. To help streamline software development, the kit is supported by a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), called MRAA, and a software repository, called Useful Packages and Modules (UPM), both from Intel. A HAL allows the operating system kernel to interact with hardware in a general way, instead of at a detailed hardware level, so few or no changes are needed when kernel-mode code is run on different hardware platforms. MRAA simplifies the logic for connecting to different sensor pins, and supports Arduino and RPi platforms, C++, Python, JavaScript, and Java. UPM provides software drivers for a wide variety of commonly-used sensors and actuators, which are also available for Arduino and RPi platforms.

“ADLINK’s I-Pi SMARC development kit supports a variety of deployment scenarios, even allowing engineers who have already created prototypes using Arduino or RPi platforms to leverage those ecosystems and libraries, and quickly and easily migrate their designs into a long-lived, revision-controlled, industrial production environment,” said Henri Parmentier, ADLINK´s product manager for SMARC and Q7 product lines.

Lifecycle management is another issue when developing on commercial platforms since hardware components may change without substitutions being communicated to end users. In contrast, any component or process change to an ADLINK SMARC module is announced per industry-standard engineering change notice (ECN) and process change notice (PCN) practices a minimum of six months before the implementation. ADLINK module support also includes 10-year availability, after sales support and return merchandise authorization (RMA), and reporting and debugging on production quality issues.